[Bug-zile] Re: Zile 2.3.5 released

[Reuben Thomas]

On Thu, 9 Apr 2009, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Reuben Thomas <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > At the moment, Lua is only a maintainence dependency. Eventually it
> > will become a run-time dependency. This fits with the goal of having a
> > very small footprint because Lua is very small:
> >
> > $ ls -l /usr/bin/lua5.1
> > -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 142K 2009-03-30 11:21 /usr/bin/lua5.1*
> > mord 21:12:34 download$ ls -l src/zile
> > -rwxr-x--- 1 rrt rrt 142K 2009-04-08 21:17 zile*
>
> Hmm, does that mean doubling Zile's size when Lua is embedded into it?

No, because Lua won't be embedded in it. Zile will be rewritten in Lua (I 
have already started). There will be a lot less code. Of course, it will be 
bigger than it is now. I don't propose to optimise the Lua build, as I don't 
think that another 100Kb or so is a problem (as I say, I'm aiming at small 
installations, not machines with little memory), but if it did become a 
problem then Lua is highly configurable at build time and I'd be surprised 
if I couldn't make a version of Zile written in Lua that is smaller than 
the version written in C.

Also, comparing the sizes of binaries can be misleading: my system's copy of 
Zile, which is of version 2.2.59, is only 110Kb. I don't think I've added an 
extra 32Kb of binary since then, so some of the difference will be due to 
compiler versions and options; therefore, the relative size of Lua is 
probably slightly bigger than the (rather neat!) comparison above indicates.

As I said before, I'd be far more worried about dynamic memory consumption 
than static footprint.

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